Warning: this piece includes references to sexual assault, as well as words many may find offensive.
Everything discussed is alleged in a civil lawsuit filed by the family of Jane Doe.

One good man.

That is all a then 20-year-old Jane Doe needed to save her from the monsters encircling her in that frat house of ghastly, unrelenting violence few of us can comprehend.

The Cornell Univeristy student was allegedly betrayed by a friend, drugged, and subjected to seven hours of dehumanizing brutality, passed from one monster to another.

And while her body was being ravaged, her worth was being disregarded, and her will was being ignored by seven of her schoolmates, a post was made to a group chat of their CHI PHI fraternity brothers:

It simply said, “Free P*ssy.”

A human being, advertised like a property, offered up for the carnal pleasure of strangers, treated as nothing, given away to anyone.

According to reports, replies to the post soon came in:

”This is crazy work!”

”I fucking love CHI-PHI!”

”Like you can walk in and whip it out.”

A sickening parade of sadistic celebration and perverse indifference…

And there was something else in that group chat, just as terrifying: silence.

Violent, collaborative, cowardly silence.

Not one young man questioned it.

Not one protested.

Not one made any efforts to remind these monsters of the intrinsic value of the human being in that room.

None of them advocated for her.

None defended her.

None intervened.

For hours, Jane Doe was being passed around and violated by their “brothers,” and not a single young man among them possessed the courage to make the smallest stand on her behalf.

If there was just one man in that chat who’d been raised to believe in consent, who’d been taught to see women as equals, who’d been told by their fathers how men of character speak when no one else will, it would have all been different for her.

They didn’t have to confront the men in that chat. They could have reported it to police anonymously. They could have informed campus security. They could have called their parents. They could have texted another friend at the house. They could have called in a fire report.

They could have done anything but nothing, and Jane Doe may have been spared the full atrocities she ended up enduring, both in those seven hours and in the agonizing months since.

And the fact that, by all accounts, none of the likely dozens of young men in that group chat had the elemental human decency to speak up is an indictment of them, of their parents, and of a culture that has allowed the young men in our collective care to devolve into such mindless barbarism.

We needn’t look any further than a sitting president, who was first elected just two weeks after being recorded saying he could grab a woman by the p*ssy.

By the p*ssy…

I don’t believe the repetition of that word is a coincidence but a symptom. It is the marker of a national crisis of masculinity that has trickled from the top, all the way down into a fraternity group chat where one of our daughters was being reduced to a thing.

As much as she is deserving of protection, it’s almost unfair to her that we need to refer to the Cornell University victim as Jane Doe.

She has a name.

She is someone’s daughter.

She is someone.

She has gifts and dreams and plans, and all of those were violently derailed by men who did vile things and by other men who did nothing.

She deserved better that night, and better from the police and the school ever since.

Two years ago, in the small room of a fraternity house and in the white, empty silence of those phone screens, Jane Doe was being given the message that so many of our daughters hear every single day from their politicians, their pastors, from their fathers, and from their peers: you just don’t f*ckin’ matter.

Over seven hours of unimaginable suffering and indignity, she only needed one young man in that chat or in that house to have the slightest bit of humanity.

It would have taken one good man to spare her a lifetime of trauma.

And the fact that there was not one good man there to be found should fully sicken all of us.